


It's Time To Decide Who Will Be Saved

by Captain_Aurinko



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Crime crew captured by dark matters, Gen, Mostly this is just juno being well adjusted, Not! Benzaiten, Psychological Torture, Sasha has a crisis of conscience, Sort Of, and sasha not knowing how to handle it, sasha's pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25020211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Captain_Aurinko/pseuds/Captain_Aurinko
Summary: Any minute now, she knew, the door would open, and Juno would scowl and shield his eyes from the bright lights of the hallways. Then, his eyes would adjust and go wide with disbelief. He’d recover enough to fling himself backwards into the corner of the cell, trying to put as much distance between himself and the thing in the doorway as possible, maybe growl at it to stay away from him. But his anger would give way to fear, and then terror, and then pain, and it wouldn’t stop until he was hollow eyed and broken, giving up exactly the information that they needed to stop the Aurinko Crime Family.AKASasha tries to get information out of Juno, and it doesn't go how she planned.
Relationships: Benzaiten Steel & Juno Steel, Sasha Wire and Juno Steel
Comments: 45
Kudos: 148





	It's Time To Decide Who Will Be Saved

Sasha Wire, Director of Dark Matters, possibly the most powerful woman in the galaxy, was a hard woman to get the attention of. Her easier days were spent managing interplanetary conflicts and stopping world ending super weapons, so usually, the least important people she interacted with were presidents and tyrants. This was not one of her easier days, largely because of the one, relatively unimportant person that all her attention was focused on. 

Technically it’s supposed to be on six unimportant people, but even when in the company of assassins, outlaws, smugglers, hackers, and thieves, Juno Steel was the one she didn’t want to let out of her supervision for even a moment. Despite fifteen years of frosty silence and her best attempts to distance herself emotionally, she still couldn’t help the urge to pull him out of the oozing heap of trouble he’d found himself in. 

Not this time, though. He was on his own. Ever since she’d known him, he’d thrown himself into every glance with death he could find, and when he couldn’t find any, he’d create them on his own. She watched him run into hundreds of fist and fire fights with a hungry, empty look in his eyes. 

Eye. Juno had an eyepatch now. Sasha could probably find out how it had happened if she checked the briefings on Juno’s movements over the past 2 years. She didn’t check. It wasn’t necessary, and she had more self control than that. She wouldn’t be Director of Dark Matters if she couldn’t separate her emotions from her decision making skills. 

Alone in her office, she pulled up the video of Juno’s cell on her comms. He sat on the floor, glaring at the camera. She almost smiled at his familiar moral outrage, but the knowledge of what she was about to do to him killed that smile long before it reached her lips.   
Any minute now, she knew, the door would open, and Juno would scowl and shield his eyes from the bright lights of the hallways. Then, his eyes would adjust and go wide with disbelief. He’d recover enough to fling himself backwards into the corner of the cell, trying to put as much distance between himself and the thing in the doorway as possible, maybe growl at it to stay away from him. But his anger would give way to fear, and then terror, and then pain, and it wouldn’t stop until he was hollow eyed and broken, giving up exactly the information that they needed to stop the Aurinko Crime Family. 

The knowledge that Juno would be physically untouched was a cold comfort. Dark Matters was, above all else, practical, and they knew that a suspect would say anything to get physical torture to stop, whether or not it was true. So, they resorted to other, less obvious methods instead. They preyed on a person’s fears, insecurities, and traumas, leaving them unsure of what was real and what was a figment of the imagination. Luckily for Sasha, she was well acquainted with Juno’s deepest trauma. She remembered the fateful day twenty years ago Mick had called her in a panic. When he’d gone to pick up a shaking, non-verbal Juno Steel from his mother’s house and helped him home. When Mick, the biggest baby she knew, didn’t cry because he recognized that he needed to be the strong one as he told Sasha that the brightest person in all of their lives was gone. 

A few days ago, a handful of Agents came to her for information needed to program the bot, and she had volunteered everything she knew, ignoring the bile that rose in her throat as she gave up childhood nicknames and favorite television shows and the few pictures that she had to the programmers that would bring Juno’s worst day to life.

On the screen of the comms, the cell door opened and Sasha forced herself to watch as Juno stilled. 

Benzaiten Steel smiled his galaxy’s best smile from the doorway. “Hey, SuperSteel. It’s been a while. You miss me?”

To her surprise, Juno didn’t explode. There was no crying, screaming, or punches thrown. He just watched Ben carefully, and took a shaky breath. “Wow, Sasha, not half bad. Get Mick in here, and it’ll be a party. The Oldtown teens, together again.” 

Sasha stiffened, even as Not!Benzaiten cocked his head with a smile filled with brotherly worry and said. “Uh, Juno? Sasha’s not here. What, you see your brother after a couple decades of the cold shoulder and can’t even be bothered to give me a hug? Ouch.”

Juno didn’t bother to respond to the thing wearing his dead brother’s face. “Of course you’d be listening, Sasha. Out of guilt, if nothing else. You must’ve helped program this thing. You know what it’s like to see your sibling who’s two, three decades dead. No matter how you feel about me, Benzaiten didn’t deserve this. Don’t do this to his memory.”

Now Sasha was glad she ordered her subordinates to leave her alone while she oversaw this interview. Already, her hand was tightly clenching the smooth metal of her desk. Something was wrong. Juno was being sharp and hurtful, no surprise, but he wasn’t lashing out. This wasn’t an attempt to redirect his own pain. Juno’s expression was dark, but he wasn’t afraid of his brother’s copy. Last time she’d seen him, when she was being promoted to Subdirector, he couldn’t bring himself to say Benzaiten’s name aloud. As she lived out the worst of her pain and fears, he had woven the thorny protective barriers around his own trauma even tighter. He hadn’t changed in fifteen years. What had happened in the last two that had gotten through his cruelest defenses? 

“Look, SuperSteel, I get it! You’re in a big, weird spooky place with weird, spooky people. You don’t want to trust me. That’s fine! I’m happy just getting to hang out with my baby brother again.”

Almost reflexively, Juno muttered “I’m ten minutes older than you.” 

“Then maybe you should start acting like it and stop giving me the silent treatment. Come on, it’s been twenty years. There’s gotta be something new that’s happened since then that you’re dying to tell me about.”

Juno huffed a laugh. “Pretty weak tactic, Sasha. You’re gonna have to try harder than that.”

“Hey, like I said, Sasha isn’t part of this. I’m just trying to make small talk, that’s all. Come on. How are things in the HCPD? Catching bad guys, saving the day. How’s Falco? Did you and Diamond ever get hitched?”

That won a flinch from Juno. “Low blow,” he growled. At least some things were still the same, even if they were the sort of things that Mick had made her swear on Annie’s grave never to say to Juno. He must have forgotten that Annie had never gotten a burial. That knowledge was never far from Sasha’s thoughts. 

Ben’s smile flickered out. “Didn’t work out, huh. I’m… sorry, Juno. Really.”

“Ben didn’t even know Diamond,” Juno muttered, half to himself. “Pretty shabby job, Sash, having him bring up… that… but not having him know that I was a P.I. Makes it too easy to pick apart the holes in the story.”

“A P.I, huh?” Sasha saw the exact moment the bot changed tactics. His smile got sweeter, and his eyes got colder. “Yeah, that tracks. Guess Ma was probably right about you destroying everything you touch, huh?”

“She wasn’t.” Juno said, and then blinked a moment later as if he’d surprised himself. “She was wrong, and I’m finally in a place where I can believe it.” 

Benzaiten kept talking but Sasha wished that she could pause the conversation. In the back of her mind, she wondered if this was some sort of test. Was there a position higher than Director that they would hide from her? She wouldn’t put it past Dark Matters. Would they make a bot of Juno that she was supposed to torture to test her committment to the job? It wouldn’t make sense for them to promote her by giving her the same test twice, but she couldn’t imagine the Juno that she knew acting like this. But no, she was being ridiculous. Dark Matters would have made a Juno that acted how she would expect him to act. So that meant this new Juno Steel who didn’t agree to the truth of the insults thrown at him and who didn’t bare his teeth at the mention of his past was the same Juno Steel she had been friends with so many years ago. Unaware of Sasha’s mental epiphanies, Not!Benten rambled on.

“--And I’m proud of you, SuperSteel! It only took you forty years to get it together. Well, if you can call this getting it together. After all, Mom only ever killed one person, and she was an old lady by then. But you? You’ve got a whole menagerie of ghosts at your heels. And talk about starting young! You were, what, thirteen when you killed Annie?” Sasha narrowed her eyes at the screen. It was more unsettling than she had imagined to hear kind, warm Benzaiten confirming Juno’s worst fears about himself. She forced her jaw to unclench. Juno looked pained, at least.

“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Ben continued. “Annie was just an accident, but me? You goaded mom for  _ years _ . You knew she was unstable. You knew she was gonna do something bad. You’d been saying so for as long as I can remember. And yet, when she was crazier than ever, you left me with her. Trapped me in a house with a madwoman who spent our whole lives obsessing over how monstrous her children were. All you had to do was wait for the inevitable. How’s that for premeditated, Mr. Private Investigator?”

“No, that’s not—”

Ben shook his head good-naturedly. “I don’t blame you though. I was always going to be there to stop you two from destroying yourselves. I was always gonna be there to pick up the pieces after you and mom really went at it. As long as I was there, you two could never really get away from each other.” 

“No—stop it—Ben, that wasn’t—”

“And hey, Lady Raincloud, it gave you the excuse you needed to throw yourself a pity party! Not like you needed an excuse. You threw yourself at every waiting knife whether I was there or not, and you loved me, Juno, but I kept you from hurting yourself like you wanted to. Like you needed to. Admit it. It was a relief when you were finally free to tear yourself to shreds.”

“Stop talking, please, just let me think—”

“I cried out for you, you know. As I died. Didn’t call for an ambulance. Didn’t talk to mom. I just kept hoping that you’d walk through that door. I knew you were going to— to swoop in and save me, just like you always did. Just like Andromeda in the games we played as kids. I knew you’d come storming in, and everything was gonna be alright. But hey, I guess you were paying more attention to those episodes than I did, or I wasn’t thinking too clearly, because I forgot: Andromeda saves the day, but she never makes it home. Where were you, Juno? I drowned in my own blood. Do you know what that feels like? Can you imagine? It took me more than ten minutes to die, and I felt every second. Because of you—”

“ _ God damn it, I told you to stop _ .” Juno was breathing hard. “I’m not going to listen to this. Whatever you say, god damn it, I’m not going to listen. This isn’t you—this isn’t Benten. I didn’t trap you with her. You—Ben chose to stay with mom. Do you wanna know why? Because Benzaiten Steel saw the good in everyone. And Mom— Mom wasn’t crazy. Sure, she was angry and scared and confused, but she was more than that. Benten saw that and he couldn’t give up on her. And that was his choice, not mine. I’m done taking credit for other people’s choices. You weren’t my fault. Ma wasn’t my fault.” Juno looked up at the camera. “Annie wasn’t my fault. And yeah, maybe it took me a while to figure it out, but at least I did. That’s a lot further than some people get.” 

There was a long moment of silence. Ben stood perfectly still. Doubtlessly, the programmers behind his actions were frantically debating the next vein of weakness they should target. The data they had gathered on Juno was off. His patterns of suicidal ideation and depression weren’t presenting an opening. Sasha, for her part, was reeling in her own way. Juno didn’t think Annie was his fault. It wasn’t, of course, but what was he trying to accomplish by saying it. Was this an apology to her? Was he trying to gain sympathy? Get her to call the interrogation off? No, Juno’s strategy for getting out of trouble had always been to dig himself deeper. But was he genuinely trying to apologize to her here? While he was tortured on her orders? 

She groaned.

Of course he was. It was the most in character thing he’d done all day.

Juno “Bad Timing for an Emotional Epiphany” Steel had struck again.

Not!Benten spoke again, voice soft. “Alright. You don’t want to talk about us? Fine. It’s all just ancient history anyways. I  _ am _ interested to hear about how you ended up going from Mr. Cop Academy to Dark Matters suspect number one. You’ve got your own wanted posters now, and I gotta admit, I’m a little jealous. Do you know how hard I had to work to get onstage? But no, you commit half a dozen galactic felonies and suddenly your face is smack between Jet Sikuliaq’s and Vespa Ilkay’s.”

Juno watched Not!Ben warily. “Well, you always liked the limelight. Thought I might as well see what all the fuss was about.”

“What do you think? Is it all it cracked up to be?”

“As hotels go, this place is pretty one-star. The closest thing you get to room service is your dead brother coming in to remind you of all your greatest failures.”

“Hey, but they do fold the towels into fun animal shapes and leave mints on the pillows!”

“Knowing this place, those are probably cyanide capsules.” 

Not!Benten laughed. “But seriously, Super-Steel, you’re working with some crazy people, you know that, right? I mean, the Unnatural Disaster? He killed fifteen people. For _ fun _ , Juno.”

“Back on the force, Margaret Lancer killed twice as many people on her off days and got a promotion out of it. At least Sikuliaq is trying to be better than he was.”

Sasha hissed. It was another dig at her. She’d worked alongside Lancer in the academy, and had witnessed her cruelty firsthand. She hadn’t reported it, though. If she was going to get high enough in the institution to root out corruption, she couldn’t start by making waves at the bottom. She’d always sworn that Margaret would be the first to go once she had enough power to fix things. Then Dark Matters happened and suddenly she was climbing a different ladder. When there were millions of lives on the line, one bad cop in Oldtown didn’t seem quite so important. Evidently it was to Juno. 

“Come on, Juno.” Not!Benten gave his brother a knowing, smug smile that never would have appeared on his face. It was too Dark Matters and not at all Benzaiten Steel. Sasha was seized with the inane urge to tear the bot’s head off with her bare hands. It was irrational. “You and I both know that you don’t always make the best decisions, even when you think them through. I mean, you thought you wanted to be a cop, and look how that turned out. You thought you wanted to marry Diamond—” Juno flinched again. “And look how  _ that _ turned out. Hell, you thought working for Ramses O’Flaherty was a good plan. Now you’re a space criminal. Juno, I love you, but do you really think this is going to end up going any better than any other time you’ve worked with others? I don’t want this to be another Ma, or another Diamond, or another Hijikata. I don’t want you to get hurt again, Juno.”

“Yeah, well you’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

“I’m serious. These people aren’t little old ladies who hit their kids and keep guns in their purses right next to their anti-hallucinogens. These are people who have built their entire careers on hurting others. I don’t want you ending up like them.”

“You sound like our middle school guidance counsellor.  _ ‘If someone hits you, don’t hit back. Reverse-bullying is just giving into what they want.’  _ Come on, Ben would never say that stuff. He once seriously tried to convince me to burn down an ex’s house. These guys are hurting people? How? Out of the crimes that  _ you know _ we’ve done together, we’ve stolen a few million creds and an artifact from a trillionaire who wouldn't even notice a dent in her wallet if we’d taken a billion, we tried to save an inventor who was going to give free energy to the whole galaxy, we stole a weird machine blade thing without killing anyone, and we broke some bots and copied one program from a server farm in the middle of nowhere. And by the way, on two of those missions, you guys did way more damage than us. There was no reason to kill M’Tendere. There was no reason to take over the lives of everyone on that server farm and give them brand new identities off on some isolated asteroid somewhere. You think that just because you have power, you can do anything. Well guess what? When we’re through, a lot more people are going to have power, and they’re gonna be a hell of a lot harder to control.”

“Juno—”

“You can turn your fun little toy off now, Sasha, and come talk to me yourself like a big kid. This is stupid and we both know it.”

Not!Ben laughed, but it sounded wet and strained. “Well, If you wanted to get rid of me that badly, SuperSteel—” Blood bloomed across Benzaiten’s white shirt, dripping down from a small opening where his left lung would be. He staggered and fell to his knees. This, Sasha knew, had been one of the ultimatums that they had agreed upon. This, if nothing else, would have broken the old Juno. She wanted to shoot the agents in charge of the bot. They were being idiotic. If nothing else had worked on Juno, then this wouldn’t either. They weren’t dealing with the same person Sasha had described to them, and it frustrated her that they hadn’t realized a change in tactics would be needed. They just floundered with the information they’d been given.

Sure enough, Juno watched with bitter resignation as his brother fell to the floor, gasping wetly for air that was pushed out by the blood already beginning to fill his lungs. He looked sickened, but not surprised. 

“It was fifteen minutes,” he said quietly. “It took him fifteen minutes to die, not ten. Falco convinced the coroner to change the times on the certificate of death. They thought it’d be a mercy to me if I thought his death was quicker, that he didn’t suffer for very long, but I did my own investigation. I don’t think I ever told you that, Sasha. I guess we didn’t talk much without Benten or Mick around to keep things civil.”

“Juno—” the Not!Ben robot gasped out, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Juno, where—” Staring up at the ceiling, he groped around blindly, desperately, for his brother. 

Juno just watched, but his voice cracked when he spoke. “Sasha, I know I’m gonna regret saying this but… is this the best you’ve got? Really? I’ve seen my brother dying in my arms every night in my nightmares for over twenty years. Nothing you and your box of horrors can conjure is gonna be worse than what I've put myself through on my darkest days. How many times, Sasha, have you gone down to the old munitions factory when you can’t sleep? How many times have you searched every inch of that place, knowing that there must be something, somewhere that the cops missed? How many times did you imagine finding her, scared but alive, deep in the recesses of that place? How many times did you imagine her corpse behind every corner? Under every scattered piece of metal? How many times have you gone over that day in your memory, thinking about every little thing you could have done differently?” 

Sasha stood up from her desk, face stony, put comms in her ear, and marched into the hallway. She couldn’t see the picture anymore, but she could hear Benzaiten’s desperate, ragged breaths and Juno’s tired, careful words.

“I’ve been trying to get better, Sasha. I want you to know that. I know I put you and Mick and… and Ben through a lot when we were kids. I caused a lot of problems and hurt a lot of people, and I always sort of thought that I was irreparably broken. Like, the fact that I said mean stuff was proof that I was always going to say mean stuff, which meant that there was no point in trying to get better. But that was dumb. I think that for a while I was even scared of getting better. Because, if I could just choose not to hurt people, then that would have meant that I could have chosen not to hurt people at the very beginning. I had just been hurting people for nothing. I would rather be born as a monstrous little time bomb than be a person who didn’t know how to help people, because at least a little monster doesn’t have to take responsibility for causing pain. That’s just part of the job description. The thing is, Sasha, it’s so easy to let yourself hide behind a label like that. To just be one thing and let it consume you until you don’t think you could ever be anything else.

“And with Benten, for years I thought he would have hated me. How could he not? Even when I started getting better, I kept thinking that maybe I was finally doing Ben proud. Maybe I was finally making it worth it that I was the one to survive. But that was wrong too, because I'd forgotten who Benzaiten was. Ben would never hate me. He couldn’t even hate Ma. Now, I guess I just like to think that maybe I’m worrying him a little less. Because here’s the thing. I think I’ve finally found people who can help me get out of this stupid little monster box I’ve put myself in. And yeah, it sucks to look back on everything and realize that I hurt so many people when I didn’t have to, but I also learned that sometimes, people are willing to forgive you, and you can be not-monsters together, you know? I guess that what I’m trying to say is—”

The cell door slid open, and now Sasha was staring at Juno, face-to-face, as a wretched thing wearing Benzaiten’s face bled to death on the floor between them. The surprise on his face mirrored the surprise she felt. “Juno,” She said. “You’re looking well. Better than the last time I saw you at least.”

“Sasha- you’re here? What are you doing?” It was a very good question: one that Sasha would like an answer to herself. Coming here had been completely irrational, and had probably compromised this entire interrogation. If she turned back now, no damage had been done that couldn’t be undone. It was obvious what she needed to do.

She cleared her throat and said loudly “Designation: Agent W, Director of Dark Matters. Activation Code: D4ff8599RK. Directive: Shut off all surveillance cameras currently active within the base. Delete suspect files J11 through B29. Delete Surveillance Footage going back two weeks. Unlock Cells 567, 432, 978, 473, and 022. Release ship, designation “Carte Blanche” into hangar bay. Oh, and initiate self destruct protocols, activation code: 44992744 Sigma Omega Sigma.”

Immediately, alarms started blaring around them. Juno looked at her with a mixture of fear and tentative hope. “Maybe I just really don’t understand Dark Matters protocol, Sash, but could you do me a favor and tell me what the hell is happening?”

“I just handed in my resignation letter.” Sasha said, offering Juno a hand and pulling him to his feet. “And then I made sure no one could trace us afterwards. For both our sakes, I hope that you were telling me the truth about trusting these criminals, Juno.”

“Hey, look on the bright side; it can’t be any worse than putting your life in Mick’s hands.”

“I’ll tell him you said that.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Try me.”

Juno laughed, cracked and broken. “It’s good to have you back, Sash.”

She smiled, ever so slightly. “It’s good to be back. Now, I think it’s about time we caused some trouble.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Spies are Forever, which just seemed pretty fitting for Sasha. 
> 
> I know it's been like a month since I've posted anything but graduation stuff got in the way! I'm coming back with a healthy serving of angst because the only thing I love more than forcing a character to relive their trauma is to use reliving their trauma to illustrate their character growth. 
> 
> On a meta note, I really like the idea of Juno being a character who no one would ever expect to change because he's been so stuck in his ways all his life. So, when he does change, it shakes a lot of people's worldviews because the idea that Juno could change after so long impacted their sense of self. we see it in canon with Peter in Man In Glass, but I think that other characters, and especially Sasha, would be impacted dramatically by Juno's change.
> 
> Also I'll probably be updating my royalty fic in a few days so stay tuned for that I guess. Yess it's been like 2 months no i don't care. I'm too pretty to know what day it is.
> 
> Comment, Kudos, and bookmark! 
> 
> But seriously, comment.


End file.
